Speaking to Time Magazine, Iwata said, “As of now, I have nothing new to share with you in regard to the use of our IPs for any TV shows or films, but I can at least confirm that the article in question is not based on correct information."

ORIGINAL STORY 07/02/2015 2.20am: Nintendo is reportedly working with Netflix on a live-action TV series based on The Legend of Zelda.

They don't make 'em like they used to. With Xbox 360's abysmal failure rate and PS3s often falling victim to the yellow light of death, it's a strange that so many consoles from the 90s are still running just fine. To test these vintage video game platforms' durability, the folks at Wired decided to experiment with which ones could survive a 15 foot drop.

Ranging from Super Nintendo to PS3, 12 consoles were selected for this grueling test of valor.

Metroid has always been a mesh of different DNA: a little of Zelda's exploration mixed in with the acrobatics of Mario and then tied together with some good old fashioned plasma ballistics. Even taking into account that heritage, there was nothing quite like Metroid Prime when it launched in 2002. Coming up to 13 years later, and despite a couple of high quality sequels and almost a decade of increasingly fevered begging from fans, there's been nothing like it ever since.

This is a unique game, and certainly a very special one. Returning to it today - which is now easier than ever thanks to the recent release of Metroid Prime Trilogy on the Wii U's Virtual Console - it's clear that the years haven't dulled its atmosphere or undermined its achievements. If anything, they're brought sharper into focus: as an updating of a 2D classic into three dimensions, the original Prime has earned itself a place alongside Super Mario 64 as one of Nintendo's greats. Alongside the excellent Super Metroid, it's also a high watermark for the space-faring series.

There's much shared between those two games, of course, but nothing's ever merely borrowed in Metroid Prime. Instead it's thoughtfully retooled, reshaped and placed in an all-new template that's every bit as intoxicating as that of the classics it succeeds.

If you're going to have bad voice acting, you might as well have really bad voice acting. It's the difference between a bad movie like Caligula, and a great bad movie like The Room. So when Resident Evil was remade in 2002 - in what's since been remastered in 2015 - it attempted to rectify the atrocious voice acting from the original title. Clearly that was a mistake as "still pretty bad" doesn't mean better. It just means blander.

As such, modder Bunny has stated their desire to fix this by issuing a mod that will restore the original 1996 voice acting to the 2015 edition of Shinji Mikami's seminal work.

"I've started working on a mod that will replace REmake's voice acting with the legendary voice acting from the original Resident Evil," Bunny said on the Resident Evil modding board. "So far I've modded rooms 105 and 106 (Barry's dining room and the main hall) but I will try to mod as many other rooms as I can."

Today is Tom Bramwell's last day at Eurogamer. The former editor-in-chief leaves after nearly 15 years at the company. We're all sad to see him go, but wish him well for the future, whatever it may hold.

During his time at Eurogamer, Tom reviewed countless video games, interviewed hundreds of developers and publishers, and even penned the odd column. He led the team as we travelled across the world, reporting on the likes of GDC, E3, Gamescom and Tokyo Game Show. He was the driving force behind Eurogamer's editorial direction, raising standards while setting the agenda. Oh, and he hired me, which, obviously, was his smartest move.

So, after so many years spent grilling the video game industry, we thought it would be fun to turn the tables on Tom and see how he'd like the hot seat. Why is he leaving Eurogamer? Has he ever been offered cash for a review score? And, of course, do you eat Doritos? Let's not pull any punches - after all, as we'd often say to each other as we'd head off to report on some event, "happy hunting."

UPDATE 8/10/14 11.55am: The Wii U GameCube controller adapter will only be compatible with Super Smash Bros., Nintendo has now said.

The company has changed the listing on the accessory's official product page and apologised for the mix-up.

"The GameCube Controller Adapter for Wii U is compatible with Wii U and Super Smash Bros. for Wii U specifically - it is not compatible with any other Wii U software," a Nintendo UK spokesperson has told Eurogamer.

Citizens of Marin County, California can turn in their violent video games to the local government in exchange for ice cream.

Ben & Jerry's ice cream, to be exact.

As reported by the Marin Independent Journal, this is part of a new initiative by Marin County district attorney Ed Berberian. Berberian joined forces with Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream along with the Center for Domestic Peace to set up a drive in which locals can turn in both video games and toy guns to receive some sweet, sweet dairy treats.

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1708325Thu, 18 Sep 2014 20:15:00 +0100Speedrunner sets new world records for Ocarina of Time in 18.10

Dedicated speedrunner Cosmo Wright has set a new world record for blazing through Ocarina of Time in 18 minutes and ten seconds.

"This is the best speed run I have ever done," said Wright on the Twitch page of his new Ocarina run, which is as close to a perfect run as has ever been recorded. Sure, he uses a ton of glitches to skip a majority of the game - something he outlined last year when he broke the record then - but it's still impressive. (Thanks, Kotaku.)

Debuting on 9th July 1981 in arcades, Donkey Kong was one of Shigeru Miyamoto's first creations and marks the first appearance of video game's most ubiquitous mascot, Mario - though at the time he was known only as Jumpman.

While Mario stole Donkey Kong's thunder, the big ape didn't go down lightly. According to Jörg Ziesak's 2009 book, Wii Innovate - How Nintendo Created a New Market Through Strategic Innovation, Donkey Kong cabinets earned Nintendo $180 million dollars in its first two years. That's the equivalent of over $650 million today. (Thanks, Wikipedia.)

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1692142Wed, 09 Jul 2014 23:41:00 +0100World's largest video game collection is being auctioned off

On 3rd December 2012, Buffalo, New York resident Michael Thommason made history by having the Guinness Book of World Records certify his gaming collection as the largest in existence. At the time it consisted of 10,607 games, though Thommason noted in a YouTube comment last November that it was nearly 12,000 titles strong.

Now, he's auctioning it all off.

Along with the games, the winner of this GameGavel auction will also receive the actual Guinness certificate as well as a lifetime subscription to Retro Magazine - which includes an autographed copy of its premiere issue featuring this very collection.

The Wii U is getting a GameCube controller adapter, Nintendo has announced.

The upcoming peripheral was revealed in a promotional video for E3's Super Smash Bros. Invitational, then later confirmed on Twitter where Nintendo noted that the Wii U version of Super Smash Bros. will support this control scheme.

This device plugs into the Wii U and allows up to four GameCube controllers to connect to it. Could this mean that Nintendo will start manufacturing GameCube controller's again?

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1681130Thu, 29 May 2014 21:59:00 +0100THQ sure left a lot of cool stuff in its former HQ

When Reddit user Soulessgingr's work relocated to a new building in Agoura Hills, California, he was delighted to see that it was actually the proverbial burial ground of former video game publisher THQ. Better yet, it still had a lot of cool memorabilia from the publisher's heyday.

Soulessgingr said he'd heard that all this paraphernalia was intentionally left behind as assets meant to make up for owed rent. "The building manager purchased all the stuff that was left and THQ also left some stuff (hardware mostly) because they owed a lot of money for back rent," the Reddit user said. He later added that another colleague verified that the building owner paid THQ for the sweet swag.

Aside from the cool, vaguely melancholy ambiance of working in a place haunted by totems of a once great video game publisher, Soulessgingr was given three of the left behind posters for Darksiders 2. "I was given Darksiders 2 posters a while ago because the CIO knew I loved that game when he did the initial tour," he explained. The lucky buck.

Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem wants you to be afraid. Not of ravenous b-movie horrors, nor of dwindling ammunition, but of indescribable Ancients lurking beyond existence, intent on subjugating our world. It wants to question your sanity, to weaken the boundary between game and reality as you struggle to unravel a trail of murder and arcana across 2000 years.

An unlikely collaboration between Nintendo and Ontario-based developer Silicon Knights, Eternal Darkness is a Lovecraftian ensemble piece, of ordinary men and women struggling to prevail against an enemy whose very existence threatens to drive them to madness. Called in to identify the decapitated corpse of her grandfather in his Rhode Island mansion, you take the role of Alexandra Roivas, the modern-day focal point for an intricate web of memoirs concealed around the house. Scattered throughout history, each of the twelve playable characters tells a tale of an ill-fated encounter with forces far beyond their comprehension. They are scholars, monks, architects, war photographers, fire-fighters; not battle-hardened warriors, but pitiful humans cowering in the shifting shadows of monstrous gods.

Those who take a stand against the darkness are crushed, devoured, or annihilated, while others attempt to flee but cannot so easily escape the things they've seen. Yet each little act of heroism, each moment of defiance against the incomprehensible darkness, builds on those that have gone before, to offer humanity a slim hope of salvation. Knowledge transcends time, their stories preserved in the Tome of Eternal Darkness - a supernatural text encountered by each character, in an ethereal vault carpeted with screaming faces and lined with broken statues of those who've gone before - as an essential reference for Alex as she pieces together her grandfather's research and the events leading up to his murder.

Ever wondered how classic Nintendo games would look in first-person with a VR headset? Well wonder no more as YouTuber Chadtronic has made videos detailing his experience combining the Oculus Rift with modded version of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, Metroid Prime, Ocarina of Time, and Mario Kart: Double Dash.

Not all games - or their emulations - are created equal and some function as a better fit for the Oculus Rift than others. Naturally Metroid Prime makes the smoothest transition, since the game was already designed with a first-person perspective in mind, but some of these other games sync well with it too - at least in part.

While playing The Wind Waker in first-person seems to defeat the point of Link's incredibly expressive, wide-eyed avatar, there are moments where it really comes into its own - particularly when gliding about with a leaf overhead. I don't think a fully first-person Zelda will ever work, but having the option to poke about the scenery from Link's point of view is nice every now and again (something you can do in the recent Wii U HD remake), and if Nintendo designed these games with VR headsets in mind from the get-go it could really be something - particularly in Mario Kart if you could drive one way while peering to the side to see your competition edge up.

Every Sunday we reach back into the Eurogamer archive in the hope of uncovering an interesting feature you missed at the time or might enjoy reading again. With Dungeon Keeper back in the headlines this week, we thought this piece, originally published in October 2012, was worth revisiting.

With a brace of Fables behind his old studio and the Curiosity project edging closer to release, there's a danger that future generations may never know the sweet, salty pain of a Peter Molyneux-hyped project that fails to materialise. Bearing all that in mind, it seems like a good time to pick over a few of the most interesting Lionhead and Bullfrog games that never made it to shelves - and maybe shed a tear or two along the way.

Here's the important thing, though: getting cancelled isn't the only things these fascinating projects have in common. They all share a certain wayward ambition and an eagerness to take players somewhere genuinely new. They're a testament to two studios where designers and artists have always been encouraged to think about the medium in different ways; given the potential round of between-projects redundancies hitting Lionhead this week, it's a great time to celebrate the team's creative legacy.

"He's not a zombie," says Leon S. Kennedy as he stands over the twitching corpse of the man he's knifed to death in a forest shack during Resident Evil 4's opening scene. Kennedy is as surprised as anyone: after cleaning up the zombie infested Racoon City in the second game in Capcom's survival horror series, any encounter with a person whose rotten flesh isn't slurping from the bones must be something of a novelty.

Indeed, Resident Evil 4's Los Ganados walk tall and never shuffle. They have bright, alert eyes instead of hollowed pupils, and in some cases wield chainsaws, not mere incisors. They speak in a quick European tongue rather than slurred moans and they maintain their humble houses rather than allowing them to fall to post-apocalyptic ruin. Los Ganados are, as the game's marketing slogan put it, a 'new kind of evil', peasant folk dressed in sackcloth and armed with rakes, hoes and sticks of dynamite. They're soiled with mud and the unmistakeable blemishes of land toil; even their chickens are grubby and irritable. They are a recognisable yet unfamiliar people, furious with intruders (they pin the police driver who escorts Kennedy to a post in the town square in the game's opening moments, where he hangs idly, burning) and calmed only by the rounded toll of a church bell. He's right. These are not zombies; they're something far worse.

Kennedy's surprise at this new kind of evil was, at the time of the game's release in 2005, mirrored in us. Players had grown weary with a series whose exquisitely pre-rendered backdrops now seemed antiquated, and whose fussy controls schemes seemed increasingly cheap. Indeed, Resident Evil 4 was, in its entirety, a new kind of Evil, a game designed from the peat up with such wisdom and creative insight that its example went on to define the subsequent decade of third person action video games.

Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles is a case study in overcoming adversity. Born from the chaos of Square Enix's merger and Nintendo's brief obsession with inter-console connectivity, this multiplayer-focused title launched to critical acclaim in 2004, at the height of the Gamecube's popularity. Not since the days of the SNES had Nintendo fans had a notable JRPG to call their own, an absence which Crystal Chronicles was perfectly poised to capitalise on.

Announced in the wake of Final Fantasy 10, it rapidly became apparent that developer The Game Designers Studio - one of Square's internal teams, rebranded in an act of corporate sleight-of-hand to circumvent the ongoing exclusivity deal with Sony - intended this to be a very different game to the Final Fantasies which had come before. Rather than a story-led adventure full of hyperbolic pre-rendered cutscenes, Crystal Chronicles offers a series of communal expeditions best experienced with friends, while Kumi Tanioka's haunting soundtrack of lutes and crumhorns is a world away from Nobuo Uematsu's soaring orchestration.

Yet perhaps the greatest deviation from expectation is the beautiful, hostile desolation waiting to be explored. Crystal Chronicles' world lies beneath a dense cloak of choking, toxic fog, an omnipresent threat which has reduced once-great civilisations to scattered hamlets clustered within the cleansing glow of gleaming crystal fragments. The crystals' power wanes with the passing of the seasons, the continuation of daily life reliant on the sap of an exceedingly rare tree retrieved by caravans of adventurers huddled beneath their own tiny crystal shard.

GameCube re-release The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker is £49.99 / €59.99 on the Wii U eShop this Friday.

It's a full £10 more than other recent Nintendo-published launches such as Pikmin 3 and The Wonderful 101, each of which arrived costing £39.99.

Launch titles Nintendo Land and New Super Marios Bros. U also cost £49.99 however, as did Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate. But all of those are all-new releases, rather than an - admittedly fantastic - HD remaster.

Is it possible to cheat on a console? I don't mean entering the Konami Code or exploiting Game Genie-enabled shortcuts. I'm talking about the rather old-fashioned idea of digital monogamy, of staying true to one machine. Perhaps it's just a cultural hangover from declaring loyalty to either the ZX Spectrum or the Commodore 64, the sort of thing that happened a long time ago in a playground far, far away. Yet it became a pressing issue, personally, in 2002.

Ditching a console that has lost its lustre and shacking up with a younger, slimmer model might not be the height of chivalry, but definitively selling up, making a clean break and moving on at least feels socially acceptable. Juggling two machines of similar tech spec at the same time, though? It was an uncommon domestic situation that, a decade ago, involved a lot more fooling around with the removal and reinsertion of leads in the back of your telly. It seemed a little ... disrespectful.

In 2002, I was in an extremely happy and rewarding relationship with a PlayStation 2. For the most part, it felt like we were in the first flush of romance, exploring an exciting new future together. We held hands (Ico). We had long conversations on the phone (Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons Of Liberty). We were young hearts, running GTA 3. But one day, loitering on a work lunchbreak inside a Virgin Megastore, I had my head turned by a brand-new Nintendo GameCube that was running exclusive launch title Star Wars Rogue Leader 2: Rogue Squadronon an endless loop.

This is the story of how an artist adapts and refines his craft. It starts with a challenge. In a recent interview with Nintendo president Satoru Iwata, The Wonderful 101's director Hideki Kamiya talked about his first wholly original project. "I began developing [Viewtiful Joe] when my boss at Capcom, Shinji Mikami-san, said, 'Try doing the design process by yourself.'" A Capcom star on the rise, Kamiya had previously directed Resident Evil 2 and Devil May Cry - but Viewtiful Joe was to be the first title he'd design from the ground up.

Viewtiful Joe might seem the kind of classic that needs no introduction, and then you think about the fact that a master of the 3D genre should have chosen to design a 2D action game as his debut title on the then-next generation of hardware. But Viewtiful Joe is no normal take on two dimensions, and this surely has its roots in the timing of Kamiya's rise to prominence.

Kamiya's big break had come in directing Resident Evil 2 (he was a planner on the original.) The Resident Evil series was one of the most successful games in that early 3D era of home consoles in the late 90s, when the original PlayStation was the only real game in town. And this trained a generation of Capcom's finest minds in what is now a niche art - 3D worlds built to be viewed from fixed camera angles. Kamiya didn't just design Resident Evil 2 in this style, of course, but would afterwards design Devil May Cry, probably the first truly great 3D combat game and one that used a fixed camera.

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1615668Sun, 15 Sep 2013 08:00:00 +0100Witness a comparison between The Wind Waker HD and the original GameCube version

The upcoming Wii U HD remake of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker hosts a whole lot of new bells and whistles, but how's it look next to the original GameCube version?

Youtuber GameXplain holds the two versions up side-by-side and the difference is less night-and-day than dusk-and-dawn. They look different, but the new one doesn't necessarily look that much better.

On one hand, it hosts a higher resolution of 1080p, cleaner textures, a longer draw distance, widescreen support, clearer shadows, and a smoother framerate. On the other hand, its bloom lighting tends to wash out the colours a bit and makes everything appear a tad more 3D, which was never the point of the cel-shaded look that sought to emulate an interactive cartoon. The new, more realistic clouds are also sure to be a divisive point for many long-time fans.

11 years: that's how long it took Nintendo to top Super Mario 64 with Galaxy. For over a decade, this astonishing, genre-redefining game reigned supreme, towering above all its peers, an influence not only on every other 3D platformer but on every game with a three-dimensional world. How do you follow that?

In 2002 Nintendo's answer was to send Mario on holiday - and fair enough, the guy probably deserved a bit of a break. The result was one of the most divisive Mario games ever, one that was swiftly consigned to a footnote in Nintendo's rich history: I've read many interviews with Miyamoto, Yoshiaki Koizumi and other Nintendo execs over the years, and Sunshine barely warrants a mention when the subject turns to the publisher's most famous creation.

11 years: that's how long it's been since I first played Super Mario Sunshine for the first time. Times have changed, and Mario's moved on, but this curious anomaly still remains as dangerous and exciting as it seemed when I slotted that tiny disc into my GameCube and closed the lid with that gorgeous, satisfying clunk. Because, when it comes down to it, there's not really been anything quite like Sunshine since.

Nintendo's top designer Shigeru Miyamoto has said he is unsure when we'll see a return for sci-fi racing series F-Zero.

Problem number one for Miyamoto is a lack of new direction for the franchise, despite the number of fans still asking for its return.

"I certainly understand that people want a new F-Zero game," Miyamoto explained to IGN. "I think where I struggle is that I don't really have a good idea for what's new that we could bring to F-Zero that would really turn it into a great game again."

Developers can limit used game sales by simply making their games better, Nintendo of America boss Reggie Fils-Aime has suggested.

Fils-Aime pointed to the relatively low trade-in and resale market for Nintendo products as proof.

"We have been able to step back and say that we are not taking any technological means to impact trade-in and we are confident that if we build great content, then the consumer will not want to trade in our games," Fils-Aime told Polygon.

Shadows of the Damned, Killer7 and No More Heroes developer Grasshopper Manufacturer has suffered lower-than-hoped sales for its games due to the way publishers treat its games, boss Goichi "Suda51" Suda has claimed.

Grasshopper has worked with some of the biggest publishers in the industry - EA, Capcom, Warner Bros and Microsoft - but the size difference between them and Grasshopper was sometimes a problem, Suda told GamesIndustry International.

"Grasshopper does have a very strong base; it's just that because we were so indie, publishers were always [treating us] differently," Suda said.

Five years after its founding, Austin-based Armature Studio has finally announced a project all of its own - 3DS and PlayStation Vita adventure Batman: Arkham Origins Blackgate.

The only game released with Armature's name on it is the Vita version of Konami's Metal Gear Solid HD Collection, which it co-developed with a number of other studios.

Today, Polygon broke word that Armature had been working on a first-person shooter starring Capcom hero Mega Man. Development lasted for about six months in 2010, before the character's creator Keiji Inafune left the company. Early gameplay footage suggests that some sections of the game were ready to play.

I'm not even sure all of this would fit in one truck. It's the 30-year video game collection of an, err, avid fan. And it's being sold on eBay for a measly $550,000.

What do you get? Oh man. There are more than 6850 games, 330 consoles, 220 controllers and 185 accessory things.

The intrepid collector has around 10,000 pictures of the collection, but thought it prudent to trim the unwieldy stack down to 500 for the sake of the auction. You'll keep scrolling and scrolling and scrolling.

Wannabe Wii U gamers will be able to buy up to 24 games in shops when the console launches at midnight tonight. Three more are set to be available digitally from Nintendo's eShop store.

But how does this compare with previous Nintendo console launches? And how do Nintendo's home-made software offerings match up with those in previous generations?

Turn back the clock to 11th April 1992 and the SNES was arriving on European shop shelves. It had just three games - not much choice - but each would go on to be some of the best releases on the system: they were Super Mario World, F-Zero and Pilotwings - two of these kickstarting new Nintendo franchises.

Mike Hoye wanted to give his three and a half year old daughter Maya a positive female role model in video games, but found himself at a loss for strong leading ladies in titles appropriate for kids. When playing The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker with Maya he would read the text aloud to her and swap the gender specific pronouns on the fly to make it sound like Link was a girl, but this was "annoying and awkward," so Hoye decided to take things one step further and actually hack the game to change all the pronouns, thereby turning Link into a girl.

He also chose to change Link's little sister into a little brother. Given the game's wide-eyed cartoony art style, the children look gender-neutral anyway, so a young player unfamiliar with the series wouldn't notice any discrepancy between the visuals and text.

"I'm not having my daughter growing up thinking girls don't get to be the hero and rescue their little brothers," said Hoye on his blog, where he detailed the process of modding Wind Waker via the Dolphin emulator.

Don't answer the doorbell tonight: the local kids haven't put much effort into their costumes, and besides, some of them are hepped up on goofballs by the sounds of it. Instead, stay indoors and dust off your GBA, your GameCube, or, um, your smartphone, and play some spooky games instead.

But which spooky games? Good question. To find out the answer, I asked a few Eurogamer staffers which scary titles they'd recommend and why - and a few of them even got back to me.

A follow-up to widely praised GameCube horror title Eternal Darkness was in development at Too Human studio Silicon Knights alongside the mediocre X-Men: Destiny, a new report suggests.

Up to 40 per cent of Silicon Knights staff worked on an Eternal Darkness 2 demo while under contract to develop the X-Men title for Activision, sources told Kotaku.

The demo was designed to attract publisher attention while the remainder of the studio plugged away at the superhero adventure, according to the report. It's unclear if Activision was aware of all this.

TimeSplitters 2 developer Free Radical Design had an HD version of the game in development before the studio shut down, an ex-staff member has revealed.

Rare (and later Free Radical) staff members Steve Ellis, Martin Wakeley and Lee Musgrave divulged the new information to NES during an interview about their new mobile game company Crash Lab.

"We had an 'HD' downloadable version of TimeSplitters 2 in development at Free Radical in 2008," ex-Goldeneye programmer Ellis explained. "I don't know what happened to that but yes, I'd love to see it released at some point.

Tomorrow marks the UK launch of Nintendo's shiny new 3DS XL console, an engorged variant of the autostereoscopic 3D system originally released in 2010. With bigger screens, a higher capacity battery but the same basic internal technology, the 3DS XL is - as we stated in our review - a revision rather than a revolution. It also illustrates perfectly Nintendo's penchant for subtly and tirelessly updating its existing hardware in order to maintain consumer interest and exploit newer, cheaper production techniques.

To celebrate the availability of this new super-sized slab of console, we've created a whistle-stop tour of Nintendo's vibrant hardware history, casting an inquisitive eye over the many revisions pushed onto the market by the Kyoto veteran.

These days when the previews for the latest iterations of FIFA and PES emerge, I find myself wincing a little. Not because the improvements I read about aren't worthwhile, because they frequently are. But every year offers something extra to learn: new tricks, flicks, adjusted physics, an overhauled defensive model.

That's as it should be, of course, yet as my free time is at a premium, I never really have the time to truly get to grips with either game to be properly competitive. I'll play the odd game with friends, sure, but I'm increasingly avoiding matches with online players who I know can out-feint, outmanoeuvre and invariably outscore me. Part of me yearns for something simpler.

The apparent death of the arcade football game, then, is something I find particularly frustrating. I wasted many an hour in my youth on the likes of Sensible Soccer and Kick-Off 2, and, years later, ISS on the PlayStation. But there was another football game I'd always play given the opportunity, and that was Virtua Striker. Every time I visited an arcade, that'd be the game I'd make a beeline for. I'd never stay long enough to get really good at it - I'm not sure I ever got past the fourth match on the Version '98 cab in our local Namco Station - but I found it every bit as irresistible as any of the newer, flashier machines.

The one thing everyone remembers about P.N.03 is that it was the first game in the Capcom Five, the publisher's proposal to prop up the then-ailing GameCube with a set of third-party exclusives. Though the games turned out quite nicely, the plan wasn't exactly a roaring success: Dead Phoenix was canned, while Resident Evil 4, Killer7 and Viewtiful Joe were ported to PlayStation 2. Only P.N.03 remained loyal to the Cube, though that's less a case of a publisher attempting to stick to its guns so much as a total lack of interest in a new version.

Indeed, of Shinji Mikami's seven games as director, P.N.03 is the obvious outcast. Rarely does it earn a mention when the best games on GameCube are discussed; nor does it attract the vociferous cult adoration of the likes of God Hand and Vanquish. Heck, Dead Phoenix is probably more fondly remembered.

In truth, it's quite easy to see why P.N.03 isn't anyone's favourite Mikami joint, because this isn't the most welcoming game ever made. Its challenge is stern, its plot is underdeveloped and its environments are chilly and sterile. And while protagonist Vanessa Z Schneider (the Z is important; without it she sounds a bit like a fortysomething criminal law solicitor) moves like a ballet dancer, she controls like a tank. In most games you're tasked with conquering unforgiving environments or aggressive enemies; in P.N.03, it's the control scheme that proves the biggest obstacle.

It fits that a game about precognition should be so ahead of its time. Playing through Free Radical's psychic-themed stealth shooter today is to tick off a checklist of features big and small that have since become vogue. And yet, in other ways, Second Sight arrived just too late - a misadventure born of unlucky scheduling and scuffles with publishers that led to it launching against the superficially similar Psi-Ops and then being overshadowed by 2004's heavy hitting sequels to Halo and Half-Life.

Imperfect though it is, Second Sight pips those games to the mark in some striking innovations. You play as John Vattic, an escaped mass-murdering mental patient, imbued with incomprehensible powers and plagued by flashbacks to a military operation. Vattic's telekinesis offered physics manipulation before Half-Life 2 made it cool, and as he unravels the conspiracy of his incarceration, he's joined by Jayne - a female companion as self-possessed and sympathetic as Alyx Vance.

Characters clip into cover, peering around and over it to fire in a way that has become de rigueur following the success of Gears of War. Throughout, there's a smattering of minor technologies that have received adulation in other more successful titles: camera within camera pictures, interactive computer screens a la Doom 3, TV monitors showing security feeds from elsewhere in the level, destructible cover, cloth physics and ragdoll animation. It even satisfies Reddit's current obsession with foot-to-floor contact.

The story of Free Radical Design begins with one of gaming's milestones, and after almost nine years it ended with the studio's blood on several publisher's hands. Founded in April 1999, the Nottingham-based studio created the much-loved shooter series TimeSplitters and third-person psychic drama Second Sight during the PS2 era. But Haze, the company's final game, received a critical mauling, sold poorly, and shortly afterwards Free Radical entered administration.

This article began with the question 'Did Haze Kill Free Radical?' But after speaking to every key figure in the company's history, the story turned out to be much bigger than the poor reception of one title. It's about how big publishers sometimes manhandle the developers they work with, and how badly they handle change. It's about how they asphyxiated one of Britain's finest independent developers, and drove an industry legend out of the games business.

Free Radical Design was founded by key members of the Rare team that made GoldenEye. Released on N64 in August 1997, it was the first classic console shooter and sold a stunning eight million copies. "I think at the time we naively believed we did everything ourselves," laughs Free Radical co-founder Steve Ellis. "We were kind of a company within a company in Rare and credited ourselves for the success of GoldenEye, without really acknowledging that many other people played a part in that."

Nintendo launched its fourth major home console 10 years ago today in Europe. A decade ago, the GameCube was born.

The console launched in a blaze of excitement flared up by a pre-emptive pre-launch price cut. The GameCube launched in the UK for £129, in either purple or black.

Nintendo's launch line-up included the often overlooked Luigi's Mansion, the beautiful water physics of Wave Race: Blue Storm and the best version of a Hoth level ever in a Star Wars game, found in Factor 5's Rogue Squadron 2: Rogue Leader.